15 March 2004. Today I am announcing something that may surprise some: I have decided to give up my thirty-year attempt to make the term, "visual poetry," useful for more than cocktailparty- level conversations about the arts. From this day on, I will retire to mine cell and use little but my own coinages to describe artworks containing a mix of visual and textual elements. I doubt that anyone will use these terms besides me, so they should remain uncorrupted as long as my thoughts on poetics are read, which I expect to be eternally, although never by more than six persons per century.

My new principal term is "litragraphy" (lih TRAH gruh fee), meaning what I used to call "visio-textual art," or "artworks that contain both visual and textual material." This is approximately what most users of the term, "visual poetry," mean by it--although some drop the requirement that "visual poetry" have something textual in it, feeling that if a person can be said in some way to "read" a work, it can be called "visual poetry." From "litragraphy," I derive "litragraph" for "work of litragraphy," "litragrapher" for "one who composes litragraphs, and "litragraphic" for "relating to litragraphy."

Since the area covered by litragraphy is enormous, it seems to me sensible to divide it into subcategories. My method in carrying out such operations is to find some objective, or nearly objective, and reasonably significant quality that the members of one fairly substantial segment of the group to be divided have and no other members of the group have. In the case of litragraphy, one such quality is strikingly evident: verbal meaningfulness. Of course, as with anything of this nature, there will be borderline cases--is a work that's entirely visual except for an "a," for example, verbally meaningful or not? I would say yes, because "a" is a word, but others might disagree. How about a work that is identical to the first one except that the "a" is distorted or partially missing? At what point can we say its verbal meaning disappears? In other words, subjectivity must seep in. It seems no more reasonable to me to drop my taxonomy because its objectivity can never be 100%, however, than it would be for a biologist to drop his because, for instance, there will always be chemical combinations that some biologists will claim are living, some not.

Ergo, I have ignored the impossibility of scientific perfection and gone ahead to split Litragraphy into "Semantic Litragraphy" and "Asemantic Litragraphy." I can't imagine a more sensible way to start a taxonomy on these kinds of artworks. The rest of my terms, all inter-related, fall readily into the table I posted a while back: